AP is reporting: “About 80 people were arrested Saturday as demonstrators who were camped out near the New York Stock Exchange marched through lower Manhattan, police said. The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protest is entering its second week.”

CHRIS HEDGES, http://www.truthdig.com/chris_hedges
Former New York Times reporter Hedges’ latest book is “The Death of the Liberal Class.” He participated in the Wall Street protests over the weekend and said: “The real radicals have seized power and they are decimating all impediments to the creation of a neo-feudalistic corporate state, one in which there is a rapacious oligarchic class, a thin managerial elite, and two-thirds of this country live in conditions that increasingly push families to subsistence level.” According to Hedges, the corporate state wants to “reduce the working class to a status equivalent to serfdom. … They want us to remain passive and to remain frightened. And as long as we remain passive and frightened, entranced with their electronic hallucinations, we are not a threat. … The moment people come out and do this [kind of protest], the corporate state is terrified — and if you doubt me, look around you at the huge numbers of cops, and not only that but the kind of brutality the cops have visited on peaceful protesters.” See video of Hedges speaking at the protests: http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/09/chris-hedges-occupy-wall-street-is-where-the-hope-of-america-lies

VICTORIA SOBEL
Sobel is a student at Cooper Union. She was arrested over the weekend south of Union Square. She said today: “The protests were peaceful, there was no property being destroyed. We were not prepared for these police tactics, this type of kettling, where they surround us with an orange mesh and then arrest us. They maced some of the women. We will be filing a class action lawsuit.

“I was told about this protest over the summer. I got to the protest the first day after I got off of work. I thought it would be this overly nebulous thing just about creating mischief. But that’s not what I saw. It was people who wanted the 99 percent who are hurting economically to finally protest against the 1 percent who have illegitimately benefited. What I saw in the park was a decent-sized group of people working to achieve something, an independent community to sustain the protests. Initially I was helping with food distributing, but now I’m helping with the finances and with the live video stream —http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution .”

He is able to do interviews as well as to coordinate media with protesters, including those who have been arrested. Schneider notes that solidarity protests have sprung up in other U.S. cities including Chicago and Los Angeles.

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020, (202) 421-6858; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167